Casual Connect 2013: The Power and Influence of Social Fandom in Gaming

by Jennifer Betka, SVP Marketing, and Nick Williams, Marketing Research Director, Wikia

·         Wikia is where fans and brands join forces. Wikia knows pop culture and entertainment covering movies, books, comics, and games. Their platform offers collaboration and influence, and is where super fans go to create content.

·         The Wikia Activity Monitor tracks how strong the communities are. Social and mobile make up 36% of the game communities, and these fandoms are growing rapidly.

·         Runescape is a casual game going strong after 12 years. A game’s lasting power is in direct relation to the strength of the community behind it.

·         What fuels fandom? Easy yet challenging gameplay, just enough social features, accessible, available, complex and dynamic mechanics that are constantly changing, a healthy addiction, and a good theme. The most popular themes are fantasy and pets.

·         There’s a huge demand for fans and developers to connect. Developers on Wikia can be authenticated and can collaborate with fans through The Lab program.

·         Developers should not try to build their community on Wikia from the ground up. The best communities are built organically.

Casual Connect 2013: How to Monetize Emotions in Free-to-Play Games

by Julia Palatovska, Business Development Director, and Tatiana Timoshenko, Director of Licensing, G5 Entertainment

·         Summary: The core emotions to monetize are impatience, curiosity, comfort, and ambition. Don’t force players to pay, but make them want to pay.

·         Impatience – Players don’t want to wait. Allow them to pay to boost things up, expand their session time, or to skip grinding.

·         Curiosity – Announce new content ahead of time and have locked content that players can pay for.

·         Comfort – Pay to overcome restrictions, get tools for easier progression, and get protection from disasters.

·         Ambition – Pay to overtake friends on the leaderboards, have the best items, and own awesome things. Always compare players to their friends.

Casual Connect 2013: Keeping Your Development Team Motivated to Run the Free-to-Play Marathon

by Guy Bendov, CEO, Sidekick Games

·         Think about development in two phases, pre-launch and post-launch. In other words, it’s assumptions and realities.

·         The unknowns of moving into the free-to-play space are scary. Not everyone can handle it.

·         Advice – lose ridigness, locate the nimble and detail-oriented, create a small team with external help, focus on the core features and postpone the others, the team needs to support quick iterations

·         Gratifying for the team – short bursts, playable deliverables, everyone should get exposures to the numbers

·         Explore but don’t lose the end goal. Write a game brief with the main features, and then explore the game with everyone involved.

·         A free-to-play game is like running an online shop. You need marketing, sales, and in-store updates with item management, promotions, pricing, and placement.

·         Communicate with players often and have the entire team communicate with them. Players are the guiding angels and the numbers they generate are key. Print out all the numbers and expose it to the team by pasting it near the team area.

·         Tips – allow the team to change game parameters online without pushing content updates, leave time for third party service integration, be quick to respond to failures, don’t lose yourself

·         Making a free-to-play game is like what Ray Bradbury said about love and business. “First you jump off the cliff and you build your wings on the way down.”

Casual Connect 2013: Real-Time Performance at a Massive Scale

by Francois Orsini, VP of Platform Engineering and Chief Architect, Machine Zone

·         Game of War offers real-time gameplay and translation at a massive scale. Their servers have worldwide reach, no language barriers, 5 million to 40 million DAU, 100k to 500k concurrent users, cross platform, and are always on 24/7. Their games offer real-time chat with translations, events with massive parallel broadcasting and auto-subscription model, push notifications, and high availability. Their infrastructure has big scale architecture, is fully distributed and redundant, is cluster native with auto failover, and is cloud aware.

·         Their secret sauce it to know your subject and use the right tools. Pick proven software that are open-sourced. They profile everything and benchmark.

·         Ingredients include…

o    Erlang – a hidden jewel, open-sourced in 1998, supports distributed, fault-tolerant, soft real-time for non-stop apps, concurrent with no locks, hot swapping of code

o    MySQL – proven technology, logical shards and partitions

o    Redis – works with HaProxy/Heartbeat

·         Other tools to thing about – NoSQL (Cassandra, RIAK, Couchbase), MariaDB, PostgreSQL, RDBMS, Continuent Tungsten

Casual Connect 2013: The Perfect Store: Getting Users to the In-Game Store and Keeping Them There

by Yaniv Nizan, CEO & Co-founder, SOOMLA

·         SOOMLA offers developers the ability to create beautiful stores by providing a template and wizard. It supports Unity, Cocos2D, and native platforms. It is network connected and helps to optimize revenue.

·         The perfect store is a core part of the game, keeps users engages for long periods, and give users reasons to come back. Create an everyday shopping experience where users have to go in the store to complete the story. Give affordable items that enhance gameplay and give an immediate return on investment.

·         Store location is very important. Have the store come up after every level or session or when winning events. Make sure the store is always one step away.

·         Sell the value of your items. Visualize the attributes of the items, offer easy comparison, give many combinations, and prompt with “are you sure?”

·         Include some mystery. Have players unlock items, show silhouettes, and give surprise boxes. The store needs to evolve over time and not all options should be available from the start.

·         Keep it fresh. Unlock items with levels and upgrades, have seasonal items, and limited edition items.

·         Waiting mechanics work. Include fuel/energy/lives systems that take time to replenish. Include a bit of waiting in the store as well.

·         My takeways – Use short-term timers to keep players playing. When a player purchases an item, the item isn’t delivered until 5 minutes later. This will drive the player to play one more game while he waits for his item to arrive.